This is one of my husband and I’s favorite DIY home renovation projects to date. It’s a beautiful built-in home entertainment center using Billy Bookcases from IKEA–also known in the DIY world as an IKEA HACK. This project was completed in our Colorado home before me moved to St. George, Utah. We added an electric fireplace, beautiful rock wall, and mounted our television in the center. The total cost for this project was around $1,700–a small price to pay for the amazing transformation.
For this project, we used billy bookcases from IKEA, added recessed lighting, and used a beautiful quartz rock tile. We also mounted our television onto the built-ins as well as installing an electric fireplace. My husband also built a “hollowed out wood beam mantle” that he stained and attached to the center of the entertainment center. It gave the built-ins the most beautiful contrast. Believe it or not, this project only took a total for 4 days for my husband to complete–pretty impressive if you ask me!
THE NARROW LIVING ROOM WITH A CORNER FIREPLACE
IKEA HACKS
In our former life (and present), my husband and I have always been huge IKEA fans, not because we necessarily love the style of IKEA, but because IKEA has the best stuff for doing a HACK. Some of our most beautiful home projects are IKEA HACKS.
What is an IKEA HACK you ask?
Definition: Take something that you purchase from IKEA (that’s cheap), and jazz it up to make it look expensive (using new moldings, hardware, or wood trims).
MY FORMER LIFE
This is the home we lived in when we lived in Colorado. We now live in the greater St. George, Utah area. I wish I had more photos of all our DIY projects that we worked on in this house, but I wasn’t blogging as regularly then (mostly because I was always working on a house project), and so I didn’t document and share the process, but I want to show all the ways that we have modified and update our home to make it beautiful. This is one of those projects.
A BUILT IN HOME ENTERTAINMENT CENTER
This is one of our favorite IKEA hacks to date. We had a very small, narrow living room in our Colorado home because our corner fire place took up so much space, and the space was always cramped. SOOOOOOOO, my husband and I decided to get rid of our bulky corner fireplace, and replace it with a grand built-in and an eclectic fireplace. Now, I normally wouldn’t recommend exchanging a gas fireplace for an electric, however, because of the narrow size of the living room and the narrow size of our budget, removing the corner, gas fireplace actually expanded our living room space without breaking the budget. Adding that extra space in our tiny living room changed everything for the better!
EXTENDING THE HEIGHT OF THE CABINETS
We used the billy bookcase from IKEA and added IKEA shelving extensions that made the bookcases (without the crown moulding) stand at 9 feet hight. The photos are deceiving, because these built-in bookcases were actually quite tall (which is hard to see in these photos). My husband then built out a center section which we tiled stone onto and built a frame to set in the electric fireplace (which just plugged into an outlet in the wall). We mounted our television to the center section (and if you choose to do this, make sure you leave a place to run your television wires behind the wall–you don’t want visible cables hanging down).
CROWN MOULDING
To IKEA HACK the bookcases, we added moldings and trims around the base of the book cases, and my husband built a beautiful crown molding to attach to the top. Adding this built-in living room entertainment space added so much value to our home. It was a beautiful feature in our living room, and it gave us the badly needed extra space we were after.
